Mismatch

Spoiling for a fight: Mexican friar Ignacio (Jack Black) moonlights as a wrestler in the film Nacho Libre. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

The most sacred cows in Mexico are the church and professional wrestling. To wit: 89 per cent of the population classifies itself as Roman Catholic and when popular grappler El Hijo del Santo switched from hero to villain in 1996, it caused near riots in Mexico City.

So it took some cojones for Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess to make jokes of both topics in his new comedy, Nacho Libre. Starring Jack Black as an underachieving friar with a secret love for Lucha Libre, the Mexican style of wrestling famous for its colourful masks, the film is far from weighty — with its fat jokes, Naked Gun-style slapstick and comic-book dialogue, it’s essentially a three-minute YouTube video padded out to 90 minutes.

Whether or not you laugh will depend first on whether you like Jack Black and second on whether you like him as a Mexican. Hess’s most blatant invitation to controversy is casting the white Black as Ignacio, the cook at a poor orphanage in Oaxaca, Mexico who dons powder-blue tights to become Nacho Libre, unlikely hero of the amateur Lucha circuit. Sporting a ridiculous bandito moustache and an accent that would embarrass Speedy Gonzales, Black’s ripe stereotype brings up the inevitable question of whether or not it’s racism if the jokes are in good fun.

Hess and his co-writers — wife Jerusha Hess and Chuck & Buck’s Mike White — justify the racial disparity by explaining that Ignacio’s mother was Scandinavian, and try to soften any potential offence by filling the cast with Mexicans. (Many of the film’s luchadores are fighters in real life.) To be fair, the writers have a built-in excuse: It’s a farce. Since nothing else in the film is serious, we shouldn’t treat the stereotypes as such; after all, this is a movie where one of the central set pieces involves midget goblins. But as with a souvenir sombrero or a Taco Bell burrito, it’s exactly the lack of substance that rankles.

Taking advice from a wisenheimer: An orphan named Chanho (Darius A. Rose) gets life lessons from his pal, Ignacio. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

The story, although simple, shouldn’t rule out depth. Unable to afford groceries for the orphans at his monastery, Ignacio spends his time in church doodling pictures of luchadores and dreaming of making a name for himself in the ring. When he spots a poster welcoming rookies to an amateur wrestling night, he enlists the help of a petty thief named Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez), whips up a costume and sets out to win respect as Nacho — all the while concealing his new identity from his fellow monks and a beautiful visiting nun named Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera). Nacho is easily beaten in his early matches, but it only takes a few fights for him to discover that success lies in wrestling with the orphans in mind, and he soon scores a match with the swaggering champion, Ramses.

Taste is a relative thing. In the U.S. and Canada, professional wrestling is primarily an object of ridicule rather than worship and if ham-fisted screen sermons like The Passion of the Christ are any indication, religion might also benefit from the occasional ribbing.

What shouldn’t be treated so lightly are things like comedic logic and clever writing. Despite having an actual plot arc, a feature sorely lacking in Napoleon Dynamite, Hess mines the same affected, aimless humour; even the silliest comedies impose a limit on outright nonsense. Hess’s idea of a great joke involves Nacho inviting Encarnación to his quarters for toast — the implication being that toast is inherently funny. Similarly, the running gag with Esqueleto is that he believes in science over God; the statement is repeated several times with no indication as to why we should laugh at it, except the vaguely implied notion that it’s absurd for a Mexican peasant to exercise reason. Like the pet llama in Napoleon Dynamite, both jokes demonstrate Hess’s love of empty irony and suggest he’s incapable of coming up with gags that aren’t superficial in the worst, most smugly self-conscious way.

To his credit, the director has a gift for visuals: The film’s garish palette is borrowed from Mexican mural art, ‘70s rec-room camp and Terry Gilliam. Plus, in Black he’s cast a star who’s likable despite himself. But as a writer, Hess is lost somewhere in the annals of MTV, a postmodern wasteland where nothing is serious enough to be sacred or profane — and making sense is seen as elitist.

Despite its treasured subjects and broad stereotypes, Nacho Libre is about as offensive as a silent fart and only half as provocative. It’s unlikely to make anyone, Mexican or otherwise, feel anything except vague irritation at having squandered an hour and a half of their life.

Nacho Libre opens June 16 across Canada.

Joel McConvey is a Toronto writer.